Figuring disorder : women travellers in Italy

Abstract

At the end of the eighteenth century the popularity of the gothic novel in Britain created a view of Italy as a natural ideal and a social disaster. Its sublime mountains and picturesque ruins were awe-inspiring, but peopled with dangerous hoards of ruthless banditti. The heroine of Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho looks on the dark Italian woods and 'almost [expects] to see banditti start up from under the trees.' As Maggie Kilgour observes, Emily is 'obsessively, ludicrously, worried about banditti, whom she constantly fears threaten her. ' Indeed, the natural power of the sublime was often merged with that of outlaw violence: in The Italian, for example, one particularly striking mountain is depicted '[standing] like a ruffian, huge, scar[r]ed, threatening, and horrid!